Thursday 31 March 2011 05.26 EDT
First published on Thursday 31 March 2011 05.26 EDT

Yoshinori Ono has big plans for Street Fighter. The affable deputy head of Capcom's consumer games R&D division has already triumphed with Super Street Fighter IV 3D, which many consider the finest title in the 3DS launch line-up. But that's just the beginning of his plans to turn the fighting game series into a mass mainstream phenomenon.

Last week, I met up with Ono in London and spoke to him about his game design philosophy, and about the intriguing future of Street Fighter. What does this long-running series have to do with football? Ono is about to explain...

When did you decide you wanted to work on a 3DS title?Two seconds after seeing it I knew I wanted to do something, I didn't necessarily know what, I just knew I wanted to do something. The potential was there, I didn't even have to think about the specifics. I could see it.

After that, did you think Street Fighter?In the next five seconds, I realised that 3DS coincided with where I wanted to take the entire fighting game genre. I knew that Nintendo's console was definitely going to be a stepping stone toward that. After seven seconds, the 3DS basically said, 'make Street Fighter' to me.You said that Street Fighter IV 3D is a stepping stone. Where do you want to take Street Fighter?Until very recently fighting games have been a niche. In order to play you needed to understand all the rules, you had to know exactly what to do in every situation. The genre has been isolating itself from non-hardcore gamers. But I want Street Fighter to be a tool, like playing cards or a chess board – you just need the pieces and everyone can play, not just the elite. It will take a few more generations to get to that utopian point, but what the 3DS has done is enable me to take the first step toward my grand scheme.

Is it difficult to move toward the mainstream without alienating those hardcore fans?A quick metaphor: think of the Premier League. When Manchester United play Chelsea, you have the most professional, skilful players taking part, so any kid just out of school can't join that team. However, just because not everyone can play for Manchester United doesn't mean no one plays football. Until recently, we only ever aimed Street Fighter at the high end, we've been neglecting people who want to play at their own level. So what we've done with Super Street Fighter IV 3D is, we've retained the hardcore elements, but we've lowered the entry barrier, so people can play in the way they want to play, rather than having to aspire to be hardcore. We've established a very important milestone here.

Were there difficulties bringing over any of the moves or characters to the 3DS screen?There were technical issues with the speedy characters who move across the screen very quickly. It became difficult to identify whether it was the character moving or the background scrolling. What saved us, though, was the 3D vision. Because there's now a depth to the background, it's very easy to find out if it's the character or scenery that's moving. It's pretty much perfect.

Have Street Fighter players developed different tactics for the 3DS version?Most hardcore gamers will be used to playing with fighting sticks, but those gamers are very dextrous – that's what makes them good. So give them a different control style and they'll adapt very quickly. They've come up with some strange way of playing, they have names for how to hold the 3DS in a professional way. I'm not worried about them at all. I'm happy that I've managed to provide a much easier interface – via the hardware supplied by Nintendo and our own software. Sticks are a little intimidating for people who have not been exposed to fighting games before. I think they find pads easier to use and the way that the touchscreen registers special moves, it allows everyone to adapt the game to their own style – to play the way they want.

Street Fighter makes interesting use of the StreetPass mode, allowing your console to fight and swap characters with other 3DS units as they pass by. Are you looking to create ad-hoc communities and meet-ups as we saw with Monster Hunter?StreetPass is very interesting, technologically, and I obviously had to do something to implement it. But the feature isn't really the goal. In Monster Hunter, playing together, hunting together, is the whole purpose of that game. With Street Fighter, we use StreetPass to educate people, to suggest to them how interacting with other players might work. Some people don't want to play with others – they just want their own console, they want to be offline all the time, they don't want to interact. However, some people only want to play online – all they care about is the multiplayer game.

StreetPass is there to work in-between the two. You don't have to involve yourself with other people, but you can enjoy the result of interacting. For people who are scared of online gaming, they might find through StreetPass that playing with other people can be quite fun. It's another string to what we can offer with Street Fighter. It's really exciting.

How do you think developers will exploit the 3DS going forward? Is there much still to learn about the device?With any game we make, we always feel like we do 100%. In terms of the 3D edition, we think we've ticked all the boxes in terms of what the 3DS is capable of. But what tends to happen – and this was the case with the NES, the SNES and so on – is that we reach a point where we think we have accessed 100% of the hardware's ability, but then you learn and apply new techniques and suddenly 100% is not 100%. We have included all the features of the 3DS, but I have a feeling there exists some sort of synergy where we'll be able to achieve above this.

Let's talk about Street Fighter x Tekken, a historic meeting of the two fighting game series'. What have been the key difficulties of this collaboration?I'm going to try to force in another football analogy! Different national football leagues have their own characteristics, their own personalities, and they all play very differently. Compare the English Premier League to the Spanish La Liga – they're playing the same sport, but it feels fundamentally different. Putting Chelsea and Real Madrid together won't automatically form a functioning team. Although it's an exciting idea, it would require very careful planning and execution. It's exactly the same for Street Fighter x Tekken: two top notch games, both fighting, but in a very different style. I'm having fun creating this game, but it's tough as hell!

What alleviates the pain, what lifts my motivation to take the fighting genre to the 22nd century, is the potential that comes from putting these two together. Time for another football metaphor. Even with people who aren't fans of Chelsea or Real Madrid, when they hear the teams are playing, everyone is excited and wants to know what will happen. It's the same here. When these two get together, it creates such a buzz around the whole fighting genre. This is going to be a major spin-off – it's not Street fighter 5, it's not Tekken 8, it's Street Fighter x Tekken! it's there to draw in more interest. After that, we want those people to come to Street Fighter and to Tekken, and think, 'I've been out of the fighting game genre for a while, but now I may come back'. It's all part of my grand scheme to bring the fighting genre to where it should be.

What's the working relationship with Namco? Are there creative differences?When we first decided to go ahead with this project we agreed not to interfere with each other at all! So Namco Bandai has no say in anything we do in Street Fighter x Tekken and vice versa for Tekken x Street Fighter – we have no idea what that's going to look like and we cannot object to whatever Namco does!

That's brave...If they go down the Dead or Alive route and Chun-Li comes out rather sexy, we STILL can't say anything!

It's like Alex Ferguson managing Arsenal for one match?Yes, even the club owners can't say anything – even if he changes the whole team…

Is there anything from Capcom's rich back catalogue that you'd like to see being re-imagined for 3DS? I'd love an Onimusha or Devil May Cry title.It would be an interesting idea to bring classic games back, but one thing to note is that Street Fighter 4 3D has to be on the 3DS: it couldn't have existed without the console. If we produced a simple port of Onimusha it would be difficult to fundamentally utilise the capabilities of the 3DS as we did with Street Fighter. I'd rather bring out a completely new title. But, whether that could be a sequel or perhaps themed around Devil May Cry or Onimusha – that's a different question…

Do you think the 3DS will prompt a whole new range of game genres?If people don't resort to just bringing game series into 3DS for the sake of it, if they work on creating games for the 3DS that exploit all of its capabilities, they're bound to come up with new genres – it can do so much that other consoles can't. It would be very questionable if we didn't come up with new genres – that would mean we weren't doing enough. So I have two answers to that question – it should and it will!